CBS News, 10 years later
"Hundreds, perhaps thousands, hell, maybe even millions! There's no way to know for sure, so just use your imagination to imagine the worst thing you can, then pretend that happened there. That's how evil China is."
Give me my cheque CBS.
The US doesn't really have dirt on China so they have to reuse stale propaganda. It's a testament to how deeply incurious (or callous) Americans are that they fall for it (or play along).
I mean, the real massacres were those of the Beijing police who were brutally murdered
I'm going to just hope you are making an ignorant joke and don't know about the out of uniform, unarmed, PLA officer the protestors tied to a bus and burnt alive. Then mocked his corpse in photographs.
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I hope you can educate yourself on the incident and realize how distasteful your comment is.
I thought the body was strung up after he was dead from being burned by a petrol bomb.
And that would make the situation less offensive how exactly? Unarmed officers were still burnt alive by violent protestors backed by western influencers. The initial troop transports were mostly unarmed and the soldiers were not in combat gear or uniform. What few weapons they had were taken and turned against them. Unarmed soldiers were lynched and a few set on fire while still alive. The first round of actual fighting around June 2nd was instigated by the protestors and 15 officers killed vs 4 from the protestors side. Protestors had commandeered an APC and turned the heavy machine gun on the officers.
"Again, weapons were handed out to the bandits manning the hastily constructed barricades blocking the streets. Soldiers who were captured within the troop transports were lynched, with some set ablaze whilst still alive. The below three images show the bodies of Lieutenant Liu Guogeng (刘国庚), Private Cui Guozheng (崔国政), and First Lieutenant Wang Jinwei (王锦伟).
In one instance, Rioters managed to commandeer a People’s Liberation Army Type-63 Armoured personnel carrier (APC) and were filmed ‘joyriding’ it around the streets adjacent to Tian’anmen Square. The video footage also shows rioters driving the stolen vehicle to a military ‘checkpoint’ disembarking its hull, and then firing the vehicle’s main heavy 12.7mm machine gun at the soldiers."
https://web.archive.org/web/20230606001210/https://mango-press.com/the-tiananmen-square-massacre-the-wests-most-persuasive-most-pervasive-lie/
police in socialist countries are not the same as those in capitalist countries
The west was still getting a good deal out of China 15 years ago, so they were walking the same tightrope as with the dictatorships they backed: circulating enough bad facts about them, true or false, without riling the people up too much, lest they demand action be taken against them.
What's amazing about the current coverage is how they've mastered the big lie. Bourgeois information control is so great that people don't think twice about the most ludicrous claims about China, Russia etc unless they've already got gripes about the capitalist system they live under.
Obviously the top article has come to the correct conclusion, but isn't this just an instance of two people with different opinions writing articles on the same news site ten years apart?
At the time when the first article was written, the US blob was still living under the delusion that the PRC would become a liberal democracy because of markets. They really believed they would abandon socialism because of magical thinking that being open to the market just magically forces populations to demand they become exactly like the US. I don't have the sources, but i remember reading Foreign Affairs in the early 2000s, and lines like "naturally a growing middle class will cause China to liberalize" were thrown around in like every issue
Well it's not entirely wrong, as Marx and Lenin pointed out on petty bourgeoisie and their sentiment. Huge capitalists aren't that dangerous under socialism, those are just few necks, but China did allowed petty burgies to grow and thrive and it now have tons of liberals which are constant danger.
That's a good point. I am glossing over actual reasons why a liberalised China was viewed as being possible, and wasn't a completely unreasonable view.
I think that how i personally remember it from the time was the arrogance these views were expressed with. The way they treated China's liberalization as a forgone conclusion that is the only possible outcome. It was still in the thick of The End of History, and there was a lot of unearned triumphilism from the US establishment
this was during a time where the US was completely unchallenged economically, politically and military. There was quite a few times where this could've been the case, glad it never happened, as people now rightfully see just how western-style 'democracy' has really been.
The Us wasn’t unchallenged. They couldn’t win agaisnt the Taliban and had trouble agaisnt Iraq
Yes that for sure, my point is that it wasn't really delusion by itself, this did contributed significantly to the fall of socialism in Europe.
Maybe they thought that liberal democracy would make the people happier. It wouldn't be strange to drink their own cool aid. Also they thought maybe a color revolution would succeed.
Yeah, thats seems like reasonable rationalizations the blob would have had at that time. But personally i see it as End of History(tm) logic, and their religious belief in markets leading to all the good things they want that was behind these delusions.
Ten years apart and 2-3 years after the US government decision to spend billions on anti-China propaganda.
1st one was from the era when USA was hiding tiananmen protests under the rug in the hope china would become liberal.
Vijay Prashad was about to resign from our party when he said he doesn't care about this massacre in 1990. We had a lot of confusion post 1989 when USSR broke up and western propaganda started all the Tiananmen massacre thing.
